Internet porn: an entirely new child’s game

“What attracts you physically in a man?” Someone asked me recently. Naturally I replied that the sexiest thing about a man is what’s inside his head. Naturally I didn’t hear from him again. (This was almost certainly a blessing.)

But it’s amazing how determinedly we pretend that sex is a body thing – a sport, really, with all the competition and expectation so implied – when in fact it’s almost entirely mental. This is especially interesting now, since it seems our mental sex-tools are morphing, generationally, in a way that could yet wreak Gaia’s revenge on humanity.

I’m no expert. Indeed, I regard the very idea of a sex expert as faintly repulsive and itself symptomatic of just how deeply we undermine our own best interests.

Further, to be female and say anything publicly about sex, other than “more, harder, longer,” is to invite the wrath and ridicule of the trollosphere; to be labelled wuss, wimp and wowser. So I’d not be sticking my head above this particular parapet if there weren’t plenty of experts saying it too: internet porn is rewiring children’s brains away from sex and, more importantly, away from love.

A young man seeking professional help for erectile dysfunction is still likely, these days, to be given Viagra and told to masturbate with pornography, as though a few minutes in a dark room with a colourised postcard should revive the taste for a peachy bottom. But such remedies are hopelessly, 180-degrees antiquated.

Quite likely porn – internet porn – is the problem, not the solution. It likely originates a decade back, in childhood, and is likely a dysfunction not of the penis, but of the brain. Putting such a boy in front of porn is like giving your drug-addled kid heroin.

We’re so messed up about children and sex. On the surface, an adult can barely photograph a child without suspicion of paedophilia and if children’s literature even mentions flirting or nudity it will face school-and-parent lockout.

Yet in the real world every bus ad and TV soap is awash with meaningless sex and many children, especially boys, are hardcore internet porn regulars by third grade.

Studies report that around 90 per cent of children between eight and 16 have watched porn online, and about half do it regularly. Parents and schools worry about party drugs but the fact that boys aged 12 to 17 are the largest consumer group for this multibillion-dollar industry suggests that porn – or the dopamine it generates in the brain – is the modern child’s drug of choice.

Of course, all children are curious about sex. That’s given. What’s new is the lethal mix of access and screen-based dissociation. From the age when previous generations began looking up dirty words in the dictionary – hoping for “bum” but having to settle for “bottom” or “buttock” – or examining each other’s genitals, current children have ready access to an infinite supply and variety of what Erica Jong called the “zipless f—“.

Internet porn is doubly dissociative. There’s the screen-distancing effect, then there’s the emotionlessness – misogyny, brutality and outright violence – of the content.

The brain is key. The male brain is evolutionarily wired to spread seed, perceiving new female flesh as genetic opportunity. So, says Wilson, it’s not nudity but novelty that gets arousal skyrocketing. This is the Coolidge Effect, and it occurs in most species and for obvious evolutionary reasons. But, like calorie craving, it is now having anti-evolutionary consequences.

Where the ram in the field, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, will eventually find his desire for novelty limited by opportunity, exhaustion or (last resort) decency, the screen-front 10-year-old can find fresh pastures as long as he can keep clicking. Wilson quotes one young man asking, “are we the first generation to masturbate left-handed?”

In The Demise of Guys, Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan note that many conditions for which boys and young men are routinely medicated – ADHD, OCD, social anxiety, performance anxiety, depression – mimic arousal addiction. If your kid’s on Ritalin, check his internet habits.

The brain’s pleasure centre floods with dopamine. Next day it wants more, and more. Over time, three things happen. One, habituation requires ever-greater doses for the same pleasure; more, weirder, nastier. Two, the pleasure becomes strongly associated not with talk, flirtation and courtship but with solitude, gloom, voyeurism, screens and emotional disengagement. Three, the neural pathways re-shape accordingly.

It’s an addiction known as “porn brain”. Young males are made morose not just by erectile failure but by failure of desire: inability to want real girls, real smiles, real touch. Normalise this across a generation and you’re not only changing social patterns, you’re effecting serious population control.

Brains do recover. It takes months or years of cold turkey. No porn, period. Older men recover more quickly, because their porn exposure has been less online, and less during childhood. Young males are the worst affected.

I’ve never been much bothered by porn. What I’ve seen was ugly and stupid, arousing (in a superficial sugar-hit kind of way) but icky. So I’ve tended to a consenting adult’s tolerance.

It’s now clear that won’t cut it. Neither will Viagra, since the problem is well above the belt. Scientists – and for some bizarre reasons we’ve made sex the province of scientists, not poets – insist that, even in the brain, sex is still physical; electrical impulses, feedback loops and neurotransmitters.

I suspect not. But in the end the metaphysics matter less than our courage to deal truly with our children. We steer them from other cheap thrills – trans-fat donuts and crack cocaine – but with porn there’s that boys-will-be-boys shrug.

Yet, if porn brain persists, boys will not be boys at all. They’ll be ghosts, never glimpsing the truth that few things are as erotic as love.